Parris Afton Bonds's Blog
April 29, 2023
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April 7, 2023
FOR YOUR EASTER BASKET ~
a most joyous holiday ~
In many ways, for me at least, the advent of Easter is the welcoming in of spring, the renewal of my dormant hopes, the promise of the fulfillment of my heart’s fondest desires.
In The Calling of the Clan, the Lady Catriona Kilcairn’s fondest desire is the Sassenach of her youth, the aristocratic Barrett Fairfax, to whom she has given her love and loyalty. But she is desperately seeking to save her familial colonial home from 1776’s bloodthirsty insurrectionists, demanding she take the American Oath of Allegiance. Marriage with the backwoods oaf Jacob Dare is her only immediate option, and a most objectionable one.
Read the Scottish lass’s fascinating bridal journey by downloading into your Easter basket, free, The Calling of the Clan ~ https://dl.bookfunnel.com/wrix46o35n
In addition, my latest novel, Answering the Call, will be released next month. Lauren Hillard’s hope for her ebbing life’s renewal has lain dormant too long. With her 70th birthday looming, she is constantly thinking that there has to be an easier way. She has long felt that her family has simply stowed her away like a precious heirloom. She’s had it – she is done. Can she prove to herself it’s never too late to have the adventure of a lifetime?
Answering the Call is available here for preorder at the special price of $2.99. Trusting you will find your own dormant hopes renewed upon reading my novel, VERY loosely based on my own year-long sojourn to Mexico last year ~ I had the adventure of a life time, challenging but oh-so-rewarding! 
May each of you have a most joyous Easter!
November 9, 2022
WHEN THE HEART IS RIGHT~STARS ALIGN AND PROVIDEN INTERVENES
New York Times
Best Selling Author Felicidades! After wrapping up a year living in Querétaro, Mexico, I am stateside, at least for now. I am dancing on sunshine with the release of WHEN THE HEART IS RIGHT in time for the holidays. The first week in December it is only .99 cents!
Turning conventional wisdom on its head, Washington socialite Alessandra O’Quinn and her lover, Indian shaman Manuel Mondragon, defy time and space and politics and families to come together in the sweeping canvas of the 1920’s New Mexico outpost of Taos. Can they defy Destiny to stay together?
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In addition, if you love listening to audiobooks, you’ll love these I have written.
Meanwhile, I am wishing each of you a joyous holiday season and happy reading!
September 10, 2022
FALL IN LOVE
will fulfill your heart’s yearning for romance Today may be the beginning of fall here, but in Austraiia it’s the beginning of springtime, when love is in the air.
Fall in love with Australian history on a grand scale ~ from the mind-boggling Outback to the heart-ravaging passions of Amber, Amaris, and Annie ~ and Miles, Sin, and Ryan. FREE 9/22/22 only
June 21, 2022
ROMANTIC INTERVIEW WITH A STONED COUPLE ~ well sort of ~ 🥰
From Parris With Love ~
Behind me ~ Queretaro’s famed aqueduct I am using as a backdrop in my current romantic thriller, Answering the Call (its working title), as in answering the call to adventure . . . or the death-dealing voice on the other end of the call.
On the bench ~ a couple, whom I am interviewing. They don’t seem very communicative regarding their romance, alas! I am beginning to wonder if these two lovers might be stoned. 
Keep watching for the release date of my call to romance and adventure ~
Also, today the final novel, Vol. V, The Banshees, in my The Texicans saga is now available ~ you can read it here: https://amzn.to/3y62Fj4
“In the final volume of New York Times bestselling author Parris Afton Bonds’ enthralling Texicans series, the Paladín progeny find themselves center stage in the great military, political, and social tumult of the mid-twentieth century. Amidst this backdrop, Bonds proves once again to be a master of her genre, weaving a tender and multi-layered tale of love, loss, loyalty, and survival into a single captivating narrative while bringing her epic saga to a satisfying close. Win or lose, The Banshees is a triumph.”
March 14, 2022
ROMANCE AND ADVENTURE ARE BECKONING
From Parris With Love ~
I was halfway through writing a first draft for a novel set in El Paso in the mid-1800s, when researching I chanced across an incident in El Paso that set my mind’s wheels spinning. I knew here was a story I had to write – now! I set aside my other story. This is something I have rarely done. Out of fifty novels, if I count rightly, I have only put one on the backburner. It is still there. Maybe, one day . . .
*** And now the story that stopped me in my tracks: In 1917, a seventeen-year-old redheaded Mexican housemaid, Carmelita Torres, started a riot on the El Paso-Juarez bridge to protest being stripped naked, every bodily orifice probed, and forcibly sprayed with chemicals for typhus by the Public Health Department. Look her up and the accompanying, horrifying photos. The riot made international news.
It eventually involved over a thousand protestors and for three days shut down traffic both ways on the bridge. Dubbed the Redhaired Amazon by newspapers, Carmelita was arrested that day – and then abruptly disappeared from history and time. Most likely, authorities worried that to keep her incarcerated would martyr her and to set her free would risk her creating even greater havoc. Their solution, most likely, was to remove her from the El Paso City Jail and dump her in the desert. Who is alive today to know what really happened? But disappear overnight, she did.
I knew I wanted to write a happy ending for this intrepid young woman, whom I fictionalized as Pia Arellano. I fell in love with the young man I created who comes to her aid most reluctantly. Walter Stevenson is an agent with the newly formed Bureau of Investigation, on a mission to identify the “master spy” being handled by the precursor of the Nazi party there in the Pass. No two lovers were ever more mismatched.
Unfortunately, the disinfecting of Mexicans at El Paso continued for another 40 years until 1958. Ironically, the Spanish Influenza pandemic that spread across the world a year later, in the fall of 1918, taking its toll also of soldiers stationed at Fort Bliss, proved far more deadly to border residents than the perceived fears of typhus.
**And now for “The Rest of the Story”: Like the title of the renowned Paul Harvey radio program, the rest of the Bath Riot’s story is far, far more mind-blowing.
A 1937 German scientific journal specifically praised the El Paso method of fumigating Mexican workers with Zyklon B. Then, at the start of WWII, the Nazis began practicing this Zyklon B fumigation formula at its concentration camps. Later, when Hitler put the Final Solution into effect, the Nazis used Zyklon B in their gas chambers not only to exterminate lice but also millions of human beings.
As our globe faces the assault of yet another unhinged despot in Vladimir Putin, I firmly have faith that there will be enough individuals like Carmelita Torres/Pia Arellano to topple the tyrant.
February 13, 2022
LOVE IS IN THE AIR ~ A SCOTTISH AIR
FREE today
GET MY SPECIAL HERE
From somewhere among the colony of North Carolina’s Gaelic gentry, twenty-five-year-old backwoodsman Jacob Dare is determined to find a young woman to recreate the home that his father’s Dare Castle must have been.She would have to be well bred, well read, and gifted with the ability to turn the primitive into the palatial. If she is favorable to look upon and sweetly dispositioned, that would be even better. That she could ever come to love him is irrelevant.
December 15, 2021
YOUR CHRISTMAS PRESENT IS HERE
the Merriest Christmas yet ~Did you know that Christmas was outlawed in the American Colonies?
AT FIRST SIGHT is unlike any Christmas story you have read.
New York Times Best SellerFive years before, in 1649, the heads of Lady Evangeline Bradshaw’s father and brother rolled on Cromwell’s chopping block, along with those of King Charles’s and others. Not waiting to see if her head was next, she fled England with the family’s remaining gold and silver crowns, putting a vast ocean between herself and peril.Even here, in this remotest place on earth one could imagine, Evangeline still does not feel safe. And especially not now, this Christmas Eve, when she opens her Virgin Queen Tavern’s door to admit the midnight traveler Nathan Sutcliff, who is most devilishly handsome ~ and most determined to carry out Cromwell’s order.Also, I wanted to tell you about Sunday Sounds. On the third Sunday of each month, my publisher Motina Books will be offering audio books at a special price and occasionally free audio books. Today, BLUE MOON is specially priced at $10.99. Just click here. Once payment is completed, Book Funnel will email you download instructions. You’ll have the best experience listening to this audiobook using the BookFunnel app. You can easily install this app to your phone, or other device.
October 6, 2021
MY WELCOMING COMMITTEE
From Parris With Love ~
My welcoming committee to my Queretaro home in Mexico ~ Lucero, Enriqueta, and Victor. I am so happy here. The pace of life is slower, the demands of life much less, the opportunity for adventure grander ~ changes I wanted. 
I moved to Queretaro September 14th, and in celebrating my first month here my DOORWAY TO THE MOON will be available on October 14th for only .99 cents ~ https://amzn.to/3agzjSl
When two hearts are meant to be together, no matter how long it takes, how far they go, fate will conspire to unite them.
The Luna land grant encompasses the artesian springs, miraculously there in the New Mexican desert, near the spot where the conquistador Coronado was believed to have passed in 1541. Rumor has it that he stashed a horde of gold at the springs on his return trip from the Seven Cities of Gold . . . and legend has it that the bottomless waters contains the mythical mermaid.
The fiery Mhaire wants her rights to the Luna land grant back. The masterful Miles needs Coronado’s stash of gold somewhere on the land grant. While a powerful attraction exists between them, they are both determined to gain their goals, despite the possible misfortune it could mean for the other.
If such a fanciful creature as a mermaid, indeed, inhabits those holy waters of Puerta de Luna, New Mexico, can there then be a fairy tale ending for Mhaire and Miles?
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLERJuly 25, 2021
A SNAPSHOT IN TIME
Below, I and my five sons at Las Cruces, NM outside White Sands, eons ago when we were all young. How I miss those precious days of motherhood.
I am culling through my ‘belongings’, paring down to the three suitcases required in order to answer my next call to adventure ~ my move to Queretaro, Mexico ~ and I laugh and I weep over my sentimental treasures I must leave behind, like the lopsided turquoise vase my son David made for me when in kindergarten; the desk plaque that says “MOM” my son Jason bought with his third grade ‘reading’ points; the wonky metal Indian head (lit inside by a light bulb) my thirteen-year-old Ted brought home from a garage sale because he knew how much I love Southwest art; and so on (sniff, sniff).
Many of my sentimental treasures I have gifted to others, who I know will appreciate and enjoy them. In keeping with this, I hope you will appreciate and enjoy one of my sentimental favorite historical romances, DEEP PURPLE, reduced, August 2nd only, from $6.99 to .99 cents.
As a child, a young girl with coltish legs and dusky skin, I spent many anxious hours prowling the low desert and the craggy foothills of southeastern Arizona’s Huachuca Mountains— anxious hours not just because I was trespassing on the forbidden Cristo Rey land grant but also because I was searching among the rocks and cactus-stubbled dunes for the Ghost Lady, hoping and praying I could get a glimpse of her and at the same time scared to death that I really would.
Some say she haunted that area of Cristo Rey because she was a tormented wraith looking for the lover denied her in life. And others say she rode the area, its barren deserts and rock-clad mountains and lush, grassy valleys, because her soul was condemned to wander Cristo Rey until the fifty thousand acres—and the Stronghold—were at last returned to her heirs.
Of course, I preferred to believe the latter . . . perhaps because at that young age my childish mind could not conceive of a love so great that it would transcend time and space. I had yet to taste of love’s binding passion. But in all likelihood I chose to believe that version of the tale because even then I knew, like my Ghost Lady, my soul would know no peace until I possessed what rightfully belonged to me . . . Cristo Rey.
